March has been great so far. Warmer weather than last year, has meant that the bulbs are far advanced of last year. Of course that meant that although i'd planted the Hyacinths in stages, they all flowered at once last week.

At least the bees in the polytunnel enjoyed the ones that didn't go off to the Crossroads Village store, or in posies last week.

We also had pest damage of the Tulips in the Polytunnel. Just after Christmas we noticed bigger holes than the mice create, and although we tried barrier defence, we had to admit defeat and put down Rat poison a few weeks ago. It worked, but not before all the 300 sheltered tulips the freesias and the gladioli the bride had been decimated.

We've now planted Larkspur and Delphinium in their place, and are back to catching mice.

The first batch of flowers are now being picked each day. There are Anemones, in burgundy (bordeaux) red, and white. Leucojum, Poppies (yes they really are this coral, there are also some white ones and a pale pink)

plus i've picked buckets of wonderful Hellebores from the farm and the garden in the last couple of weeks. This one seemed to be popular on Instagram this week

These will all be in this weekend's Mothering Sunday flowers along with these Tulips, that are just about to burst.

This week's main job though has been to replant the perennial beds on the sunniest side of the field.

Last year they got very congested with weeds, and didn't produce nearly as many blooms as expected (or needed) so we dug out the plants that we wanted to keep, and covered the area with mulching plastic. When we removed the plastic this week, the weeds and grass had disappeared, and we just needed to rake the debris from the top, dig out some stubborn root systems, make weed free paths with cardboard and wood chip, and top up with compost where it was short

We've now planted beds of

perennial cornflower Centaurea Montana,

Linaria Canon Went, which is a tall pink spire

Leucanthemum Crazy Daisy and

More Geums

Next to go in will be Phlox, Veronicastrum, Eryngiums, Catananche and Delphiniums. It's this kind of propagation that i love, and we're planting in closely so there is no room for weeds to grow.

Next on the list is starting off the Dahlia tubers, so we get early flowers this year. Jennifer has pruning saw poised to get as many plants out of our last year tubers as possible, and we've even got room in the Grow tunnel to store them as we've planted out the perennials (Feeling smug).